Our original article espoused a simple way to recode religious groups on the General Social Survey (GSS) into historically meaningful categories and attempted to steer social scientists away from assigning these groups to a "Liberal-Moderate-Conservative" scale (Smith 1990). Among other problems, such scales create arbitrary cutpoints,…

We use Wisconsin Longitudinal Study data (n = 2,678) to assess the effects of religious denomination and ideology on end-of-life treatment preferences in two hypothetical terminal illness scenarios: physical pain and severe cognitive impairment. We found no statistically significant differences when comparing traditionally defined religious…

It is often assumed that the religious culture of a state can shape policies within the state, particularly concerning morality issues such as abortion or homosexuality. However, the precise manner in which religion shapes these policies has not been clearly specified. Drawing from social movements and policy literature, we argue that the…

Sociologists of religion have often connected secularization to science, but have rarely examined the role of religion in the lives of scientists or how the sciences have changed religiously over time. Here we address this shortcoming by comparing religiosity between two samples of elite academic natural and social scientists, one in 1969 and one…

Although the past decade has witnessed increased usage of ecological data to map the community-level effects of religion, the vast majority of studies in this body of scholarship continue to be plagued by two key shortcomings. First, ecological research on religion is often conducted in an atheoretical manner, one that privileges the structural…

This article compares marriage patterns by race, education and religion in the United States during the 20th century, using a variety of data sources. The comparative approach allows several general conclusions. First, racial endogamy has declined sharply over the 20th century, but race is still the most powerful division in the marriage market.…

Data from the 2002 Religion and Public Activism Survey were used to examine relationships among measures of religious orientation, embeddedness in social networks and the level of trust individuals direct toward others. Results from ordered logistic regression analysis demonstrate that Catholics and members of other denominations show…

Prior research has shown that individuals living in the South express significantly less tolerant attitudes than the rest of the nation, while individuals residing in urban areas express significantly more tolerant attitudes than their rural peers. The authors seek to explain these generally unspecified Southern and urban effects by identifying…